City of Chicago Bars & Restaurants Latest Forced to Close for Indoor Service
Historic downtown Chicago restaurant Erie Cafe. It and all other Chicago bars and restaurants have been banned from indoor service by Governor JB Pritzker starting Friday.
Governor JB Pritzker is closing bars and restaurants to indoor service in the City of Chicago.
Bars and restaurants will be banned from serving customers indoors beginning Friday morning. Gatherings will also be limited to 25 people or 25% of room capacity. The restrictions don’t apply to schools or polling places.
“We can’t ignore what is happening around us,” said Pritzker. “Without action, this could look worse than anything we saw in the spring. So please, no matter where you live, what your politics are, where you work or who you love: Illinois: mask up! And we’ll get through this together.”
Four suburban counties, suburban Cook County, northwest Illinois including Rockford, DeKalb, and Galena, the Metro East around St. Louis and much of southern Illinois have already been hit with restrictions.
The City of Chicago isn’t being penalized for testing rates over 8%, but for rising hospitalization numbers.
“What we are starting to see now, first with suburban Cook County, and now with Chicago, is that mitigation measures are needed because COVID-19 hospital admissions are going up alongside increases in test positivity,” said IDPH Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike. “Based on current trends, we soon could face reduced hospital bed availability and overwhelming our health care systems.”
The City of Chicago becomes the seventh of the state’s 11 regions in the Governor’s “Restore Illinois” plan to have triggered one of the state’s failsafe state-action metric. Lake and McHenry Counties in the far northeast corner of the state are likely to have the same mitigations announced Wednesday. The west-central portion of the state, stretching from Quincy to Taylorville, including Springfield, has also topped 8% for the first time, and would face mitigations if the rate tops 8% for 3 consecutive days.